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Source: Process Need 71

apparent to major manufacturers in the industrial countries, especially
in Japan and the United States, the need to replace semi-skilled assem-
bly-line labor with machines was not felt. The Japanese are not ahead
in robotics because of technical superiority; their designs have mostly
come from the United States. But the Japanese had their “baby bust”
four or five years earlier than America and almost ten years earlier than
West Germany. It took the Japanese just as long as it did the Americans
or the Germans—ten years—to realize that they were facing a labor
shortage. But these ten years started in Japan a good deal sooner than
in the United States, and in West Germany the ten years are still not
quite over as these lines are being written.
Mergenthaler’s linotype was also in large measure the result of
demographic pressures. With the demand for printed materials
exploding, the supply of typesetters requiring an apprenticeship of six
to eight years was fast becoming inadequate, and wages for typeset-
ters were skyrocketing. As a result, printers became conscious of the
“weak link” but also willing to pay good money for a machine that
replaced five very expensive craftsmen with one semi-skilled
machine operator.
Incongruities and demographics may be the most common caus-
es of a process need. But there is another category, far more diffi-
cult and risky yet in many cases of even greater importance: what is
now being called program research (as contrasted with the tradi-
tional “pure research” of scientists). There is a “weak link” and it is
definable, indeed, clearly seen and acutely felt. But to satisfy the
process need, considerable new knowledge has to be produced.
Very few inventions have succeeded faster than photography.
Within twenty years after its invention, it had become popular world-
wide. Within twenty years or so, there were great photographers in
every country; Mathew Brady’s photographs of the American Civil
War are still unsurpassed. By 1860, every bride had to have her pho-
tograph taken. Photography was the first Western technology to invade
Japan, well before the Meiji Restoration and at a time when Japan oth-
erwise was still firmly closed to foreigners and foreign ideas.
Amateur photographers were fully established by 1870. But the
available technology made things difficult for them. Photography
required heavy and fragile glass plates, which had to be lugged around
and treated with extreme care. It required an equally heavy camera,
long preparations before a picture could be taken, elaborate settings,
and so on. Everybody knew this. Indeed, the photography magazines